Creating a Freestyle: Music

I'm currently going through the music choosing process for the second time... and I wish it could be the last! Choosing music for a freestyle has proven to be a stressful and time-consuming task. 

The first step is to find your horse's tempo in all 3 gaits. Then it's on to listening to a million soundtracks (mostly browsing youtube.com for me) to find music you like AND would work well in a freestyle. The kicker is that it also has to be the right tempo for your horse. Tempos can be modified, but large modifications (more than around 10%) probably won't end up sounding the way you want. Also, it really needs to be music that's quite pleasing for judges of every background. The BHB's favorite music happens to be R&B... but I can't imagine it would go over as well with the judges as classic rock would!

For the DIY-er, you can download the free music editing program Audacity. It's not a very beginner-friendly program, so if you're not very tech-savvy you might be better off hiring a professional. Heck, anyone would probably be better off hiring a professional... I'm just trying to see if I can squeeze by in creating a great lower-level freestyle without spending more than $3. Granted, I've done plenty of video editing in the past, but editing music seems to be much more complicated.I do realize I may have to end up hiring someone to create seamless music, but at least it will be less expensive since I've picked out the music and made the choreography.

If you're still reading this after hearing how daunting music editing can be, let's go to the next step. First, I did rough edits of the music to eliminate the part of the music that I don't want to use. I figure if I have a 5 minute limit and have to do all of my movements in both directions, then I need no more than 45 seconds of walk, 1 1/2- 2 minutes of canter, and around 2 minutes of trot. Counting in both directions for the trot and canter, and I could probably edit it down to 1 minute trot and canter segments to repeat in my freestyle. I still left 2-3 minutes of music for each gait so that I had enough to easier match it to my choreography without creating horrid franken-music by piecing many different parts together and loosing the natural song flow.

I video-taped my choreography ridden how I'd like to show it so that I could get timing for each movement.  Then I used Audacity to edit the segments. I found the segments I wanted and pieced them together with Fade/ Cross-Fade effects. I'm still learning to use Audacity, so maybe in the future I'll figure out how to use some other effects in editing freestyle music.


A few educational articles on choosing and editing freestyle music:
USDF Connection article "Got Music?"
USDF Connection article "The Wow Factor"
USDF Connection Article "To Turn a Phrase" 

May Chatt Hills Show Recap

Our May show was decent, but I'm not sure we improved any from our April show. I did get 3 more qualifying scores for Regionals-- now we're fully qualified for the first level freestyle and need one more score for both first and second levels. Hopefully we will pick these last necessary scores up at the June Chatt Hills show we plan to attend! I still haven't uploaded videos from my rides, but I definitely will post once I do. 

We weren't set up for the best success since both of our rides each day happened to be less than an hour apart during the heat of the afternoon. The BHB does much better in the morning and/or when it's not 90* out in the blazing sun. I'm sure he would have enjoyed more than a 15 minute break to chill out after the first ride before he had to warm up for our second one. I'm sure the same thing will happen to us at the June Chatt Hills show, so I'm in the process of figuring out how to better prepare so that he can have the energy for the second ride of the day. I think we actually crawled through our second day tests and I could barely manage to get a trot lengthening/mediums out of my beastie. 

After this show, I've decided to edit our freestyle some more, at least the last part of it. We received good scores for movements at this show but then the collective marks were 6's straight down, lowering our score to a 65%. I'm not sure if the judge just hated the music or what... So now I'm going to try increasing the difficulty and improving the music even more!

Right now, I'm trying to finish an application for my GMO's Adult Amateur grant award. Having $750 more to spend on training would be awesome! I'm also planning to go to Aiken to train a week with Amber this summer (late July or early August). The BHB will be overjoyed to see her again and I'm sure will show off all his new tricks to her.